David McElroy

Here’s some weekend fun — if you don’t take it too seriously.

What’s your “personality mascot”? If you’ve been on any form of social media lately, you might have run across this latest fad.

I noticed a number of people who’ve posted cute little animal characters — squirrels, raccoons, owls, otters and more — who were customized by AI software to represent something about them.

I decided to give it a shot, but I had very low expectations.

What I had forgotten was that I happened to have AI software that knew quite a bit about me. I’ve had ChatGPT read hundreds of my articles from the last few years. I’ve also used the software for research and analysis, which had led to long and involved “conversations” about philosophy, science, culture, ethics and other important subjects.

So I asked ChatGPT to give me a well-crafted prompt that anyone could use to get a “personality mascot” and a complete description — along with an image — based on everything the software knew about the person.

It sounded fun, but I didn’t expect it to be much more entertaining than a Magic 8 Ball. I was wrong. The software took the task far more seriously than I had expected — and it had a lot more insight into me than I expected.

I’m going to give you the prompt you can use with any AI chatbot if you want to, but the trick is that this prompt requires the software to already know a lot about you (or to then “interview” you to learn enough to answer the question).

But before I give you the prompt to try for yourself, here’s what the software said for me. As I read this, I found myself thinking that this shows genuine insight about my own thoughts and feelings, which surprised me.

According to ChatGPT, I’m not an Otter or an Owl or any such thing. I am “the Lantern Keeper.” If you know me, you might think that much of this was written by someone else who knows me. Or maybe it’s just what I want to think about myself. How would I really know?

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I was meeting Wednesday with a man who’s interested in joining my company as an agent. He had told me about the twists and turns of his own career, and he asked how I had ended up where I am professionally.

I told him about my early successes in journalism. I mentioned owning several small publishing businesses, then becoming a publisher for a newspaper chain — and then spending years as a political consultant. And on and on. I tried to quickly summarize a long story.

“I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up,” I joked.

I didn’t mention the specifics of the many failures in my life. I didn’t talk about the dreams that I’ve given up. And I definitely didn’t talk about the role that luck and chance have played, for both good and bad.

The truth is that I’ve felt lost for much of my life. I started out with a life map that was totally wrong. I trusted cultural training that I didn’t know to question. I set goals that would have made me miserable if I’d achieved them. And the things that now matter most to me would have sounded trivial or inconsequential when I started.

If the 25-year-old David could see where I am now, he would have been dismayed. And if the current version of myself had ended up where my 25-year-old self expected to go, I would be miserable.

My losses and defeats have taught me plenty of important lessons. My wins and successes have felt great to my ego, but they’ve taught me virtually nothing.

Life has been just the opposite of what I expected.

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For the last couple of days, I’ve had an intense desire to return to a restaurant where I haven’t eaten in years.

Cosmo’s Pizza was one of my two favorite pizza places in Birmingham for many years. (Salvatore’s is the other.) A political client first took me there in the early 1990s and it quickly became a place that I would visit over and over — with many different people.

It was in the heart of Birmingham’s artsy Five Points South area. It was eclectic. The crowd could be strange. There was energy and weirdness in the air. I loved it.

Cosmo’s closed permanently in 2016, so it’s been a decade. But over the weekend, I found myself intensely craving the experience of being there.

I was craving the pizza, but I was craving the atmosphere even more. And after thinking about it for a couple of days, I’ve realized I was craving something else. I was craving some of the experiences I’ve had there — and it finally hit me that I was craving something about the people I’ve taken there, too.

This felt like more than simple nostalgia, though. I had the odd feeling that something in me felt like returning to the past to finish some unfinished emotional business. Every woman I dated for years went to Cosmo’s at least once — and some went there many times with me.

As I tried to get to sleep in the wee hours of Sunday night, I puzzled over what I was feeling. And it suddenly hit me that there was something I needed to say — to women I’ll never even talk with again.

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